Upside Down MOM

Arvid Wretman
2009.02.27- 2009.03.08

Arvid Wretman’s exhibition entitled Upside down MOM consists of drawings and paintings made over the last year. The images share a duality; they are both easy to laugh at and filled with an evident seriousness. Wretman comments in a detailed manner on everyday and real life but can just as easily drift away to a world of dreams and fantasy. Inspiration and impressions comes from animated films and fairy-tales, as well as reality television and news broadcasts.

Wretman earlier worked in a larger scale, but has now evolved into presenting a miniature world of drawings, texts and headstrong characters. Many of Wretman’s images shed light on the feeling of paranoia and constantly being followed. Security guards in their cars on the hunt, sad pools running, cameras and a thousand eyes observing, viruses invades walls and wizards shows the best way to escape.

Arvid Wretman:
“Often there is something tragically comic about the images, something uncanny, like waking up at Plattan (notorious stockholm junkie hang out, filled with cops) and being deformed, melted, a pool with eyes. Things like that you have to laugh about or you might as well die.”

There is both a psychedelic and surreal tone in Wretman’s close to manic drawing. The characteristic easiness of the colored ink-pens contrasts against a dejected escapism. Made specially for the Upside down MOM exhibition at Detroit, a fanzine will be available for purchase, with a selection of the artwork of the exhibition in it.

Arvid Wretman was born 1983 in Stockholm. He has been studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockhom since 2005 and currently lives in Berlin after a study-exchange at Universität der Künste.